ABSTRACT
Setting out to propose a richer philosophical alternative to the reductivist and instrumental thought of nineteenth-century positivism, Surrealism (as the heir to the Romantic legacy) emphasized the key role of the imagination and personal creativity. Its own explorations were immersed in a rich background of the humanities, with philosophy, drama and literature chief among them. The sought-after reconciliation of “dream” and “reality” was to be achieved through reawakening a more primary sensitivity to the poetic dimension underlying concrete daily experience. In its interest in the phenomena of perception and its aim of describing the textures of primary human experience, Surrealism manifested many affi nities with phenomenology. The central theme of Edmund Husserl’s later writings is the need to overcome the conceptual bias of Western thought. Human being is to be understood as rooted in the life-world (Lebenswelt), the world of daily life, or reality as it is directly and immediately given in human experience. In contrast to the abstracted, scientifi c understanding of the universe, the life-world is immediately familiar to us and concrete. Phenomenology arose as an attempt to provide a unifi ed foundation to the splintering views of reality being developed by the different branches of science, and to emphasise the importance of primordial perception and embodiment in human experience as a ground for understanding. The Surrealist affi nities with phenomenological philosophy are manifest in the movement’s concern with such “primitive” phenomena as the experience of space and time, memory, play, dance, humour and the erotic. Both also rejected abstract mathematical space as
incompatible with human experience of the world, describing instead a spatiality arising out of the conditions of embodiment. The Surrealists evolved what might be termed a “situational spatiality” – structuring spatial settings through the grouping together of evocative fragments.1 This technique, which evolved primarily out of cubist and Dada collage, exploited the power of daily things to embody associations, memories and meanings, and thus to articulate a “world”, a rich network of thematic relationships. André Breton created such a situational spatiality as a counterpart of his life and work.2
